This week, the Afghan women’s cricket team met with King Charles. They are over in the UK playing some exhibition matches, taking place while the women’s T20 World Cup is hosted this summer in England. Meanwhile, the men’s Afghan cricket team are representing their country and have just finished a tour of India. They even played Canada in February of this year.
Why are the Afghan cricket team being invited to travel the world playing cricket when the Taliban have removed most of the human rights of the women who live in Afghanistan? They have to cover their bodies completely and they can’t leave the house without a male chaperone. They can’t work or study beyond grade six. There are now no women doctors or nurses which is seriously affecting women’s health care. They can’t even go to the park with their children or sing in their houses. Women have been effectively removed from public life in Afghanistan and the Taliban are ruling over a gender apartheid state. Yet, where is the outrage from the international community?
When South Africa was an apartheid state, their sports teams were banned from playing internationally. Equity, the UK performing arts and entertainment trade union, would not allow any films, plays or television programmes that had Equity members in them to be broadcast in South Africa. There were also a myriad of other sanctions imposed on the country.
Applying sanctions that will hurt the people of Afghanistan is not something that I would like to see, however, one way that countries can show their condemnation of the Taliban is to drop Afghanistan from cricket’s global governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC) – and to state why.
The women in the Afghanistan touring cricket team have been in exile for five years now. They fled their country after the Taliban banned women playing sport in 2021 and they can’t go home because their lives would be ones of sexual slavery and bearing children. The latest Taliban outrage has been institutionalising child marriage following the publication of Decree No.18. Amnesty International has published a legal analysis warning that the decree eliminates all notion of consent and normalises child marriage.
At the meeting with King Charles at Clarence House on 24 June, Afghanistan cricketer Ekil Latifi, who has not seen her family in Afghanistan for five years, told reporters that the team was representing all the women not allowed to play sport, adding: “It’s all about the Afghan women back in our country.”
Taliban laws against women are violating UN conventions
Unicef and other bodies have emphasised that such laws directly violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international treaties. And yet, five Taliban officials were issued one-day visas by Belgium and are presently in Brussels having talks about deporting Afghan migrants in the EU back to Afghanistan. Fears are that this is the start of normalising Taliban rule, in addition to the horrors these people might face on being returned to their home country.
In March 2026, the UK Home Office imposed a strict ‘visa brake’, pausing all study visas for nationals from Afghanistan and also Myanmar, Cameroon and Sudan. So, it seems the EU is set on sending Afghans back to their home country and the UK on preventing them from studying in this country. Stopping immigration is obviously more important than supporting women in a country where they have been stripped of their human rights.
A week ago in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city, about 30 women were detained by the authorities because what they were wearing was not considered to be covering enough of their bodies. Gloves and socks are apparently now required in addition to the full burka. This brought protestors out onto the streets and the response of the police was to fire into the crowd, killing an 11-year-old boy.
And let’s not forget that the Taliban originated from the mujahideen, who were fighters resisting the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s, fighters, who were covertly supported by the US, the UK and Pakistan. So, not for the first time, the governments of the US and the UK have helped create a cruel regime to suit their purposes – only to abandon the Afghan people to their fate in the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Perhaps that is why governments are not condemning the Taliban? Whatever the reason, women are having their lives taken from them. Ejecting Afghanistan from the ICC is the least the world can do.
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